How Privacy Regs Can Deter Data Sharing in Research

Steps to protect patient privacy have inadvertently created disincentives to share data in ways that could improve the health system, a top HHS privacy official said.

“It is far more privacy protective now, in the way that we have defined the rules, to bury the data in the backyard—as long as you’ve done it securely—than it is to actually make it useful,” Deven McGraw, deputy director of health information privacy in the Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, said Sept. 20.

She mulled whether it was possible to “take the thumb off one side of the scale and ...